Except that we might disagree about what is “filmic” and what isn’t, while you seem to state that the kind of scenes you tend to like (stunts, fights, suspense) are universally accepted as the way a good movie should be done. Definitely not. The three examples you gave are precisely examples of scenes I found boring and artificial. And people talking about shit, in say the council of Elrond or the speeches of Galadriel? No way! These are scenes where the characters are confronted, revealed, where some magic can be instilled in the story. Scenes where I feel something.
Not that I necessarily dislike any fight scene, for instance, or even any cheesy scene. But there are a lot of them which totally lack any subtelty to the point of being, for me, totaly uninteresting and anticlimatic, contrarily to what you seem to think. I’m just not “in the movie” anymore when I see Legolas dancing on the mammoth. And any line by Gimli just destroy any attention I could still have. Want an example? I liked the charge of Faramir. Definitely cheesy, but nevertheless moving. A rider’s charge can be impressive. People hacking some big monster for the sake of it during 5 minutes in a row is just boring.
The troll fight or the collapsed stairs, for instance don’t frighten me. I just think : “oh! again one of these fake suspense scenes. Looks like the ad for I can’t remember which video game. Hope this will end soon”. Now, perhaps big smashing trolls appeal for a larger public than scenes intended to create feelings and emotions, or exploring the souls of the characters, but nevertheless, what you describe isn’t the “only possible, true, and real way to make a movie according to the gospels” .
[Pet peeve]It’s “different from” or “different to”, not “different than” [/pp]
Okay, let’s get away from non-written motivations, which I wasn’t talking about in the first place, and get down to plain flat-out ignoring of what is written. Sod the spoiler boxes, anyone this far down the thread deserves all they see…
Denethor. In the books he is extremely competent and running Minas Tirith most capably. He is a hard-assed ascetic who even sleeps armed and armoured so that his ageing body will not grow soft and let him down. He is mourning for Boromir and he is bitter that he did not send Faramir to Imladris, but he is not so far gone as to toss much-needed troops away on a vainglorious attempt to retake an already fallen Osgiliath. He does send Faramir back with reinforcements to try to keep it from falling, and he does use the same line about “that depends upon the manner of your return” - but he is still very much in control of himself and acting rationally. Only when Faramir returns grievously wounded and the siege appears about to succeed does Denethor cave in, driven to despair by the selective viewing Sauron has allowed him through the palantir.
Contrast this with the Denethor of the film, not so very far removed from a gibbering idiot, deaf to reason, happily tossing lives away to no purpose, taking no measures to ensure the safety of the city, and ordering Pippin to sing to accompany his gluttonous stuffing of his face while his son leads his men to certain death. :rolleyes:
Now that, I submit, is not merely a case of PJ’s understanding differing from mine, any more than someone claiming that 2+2=5 has a different understanding of mathematics.
Sorry, Malacandra, I have to take exception with your portrayal of Denethor. Whilst his motivations in the film are largely ignored, his behavior is, for all intents and purposes, similar enough: Cold to Faramir, too antagonistic about Aragorn, and he lets his pride get in the way of his better judgment. The film just takes far less time to establish this. Yeah, the book says he sleeps in his armor… so what? What is that other than an unnecessary detail? The IMPORTANT part is that he is a weak, cold, prideful ruler, and that comes across perfectly in the film.
Denethor had given in to despair long before Gandalf and Co. arrived at Minas Tirith… the palantir had been driving him to lose hope. It wasn’t explicitly shown in the films, however… so what? You’re basically saying that you’re upset because the extraneous material was cut. Denethor really was nothing more than a plot hiccup in the context of the trilogy.
I guess what it comes down to is this: What’s Necessary, and What’s Neat. As far as I’m concerned, all that was necessary is in the films (the theatrical releases). This is plain when you see that people who know nothing about the story love the movie. The only people who see the missing parts are those that already love the books… and they want to see all the NEAT stuff.
Unfortunately, there’s too much damn neat stuff to put in. And, frankly, I like the neat stuff that Jackson added… it felt like I was experiencing the story for the first time all over again, in some respects.
Again, no, SPOOFE. Admittedly Denethor gets on stage for only about half of Book V but he is a major player for the time he is on. The point about the armour-sleeping was to emphasis that one thing he certainly isn’t is gluttonous. He runs Minas Tirith’s end of the war with cold competence although he has a huge row with Gandalf over what should have been done with the Ring, he sends for Rohan in good time and only gives in to hopelessness when his last son is dying, the road from Rohan is blocked against reinforcements, and the way the siege is progressing convinces him that Sauron has found the Ring.
Prideful, yes. Weak? Hell no. The downfall of Denethor is a powerful dramatic element. Having him first turn up already at the slippers-on-his-ears stage is a travesty.
Yeah. In other words, its easier to have complex, multifaceted supporting characters in novels, where you have essentially unlimited space to do so, and narrative tools that aren’t available in film. (Specifically, interior monologues and omniscient narration.) In films, where you are severly constrained in how much time you can have to tell the story, and have to rely chiefly on coveying character and plot through visuals and dialogue, minor characters have to be flattened out to keep them from upstaging the main characters or hopelessly muddling the narrative.
From where I’m sitting (fifth row from the front, on the left as you face the movie screen), PJ didn’t have much of a choice with Denethor. Starting with him sane and having him gradually lose it would have been more time consuming, and far more difficult to convincingly write and act. Far easier to simply start with him already mad. It doesn’t change his role in the plot: he’s still a powerful ruler who goes mad with grief and tries to kill his son. That he goes mad in a slightly different manner than in the books is exceedingly minor. Who’s going to care? Most of the audience hasn’t read the book, and most of those who have read the book aren’t going to care about minor changes to a minor character. And adding more Denethor means cutting something else, and sure as sunrise, someone is going to whine just as stridently about that.
Jesus Christ on an electronic pogo stick, the movie was already three and a half hours long! Expanding it even further isn’t an option. It’s already pushing the limits of viewer endurance, and people just aren’t going to sit there, bladders bursting and buttocks asleep, for another hour to watch people debate stuff, or to pick up subtleties that don’t add anything substantial to the story. Well, the diehard fanboys might, but relying on them isn’t a very good way to make money, now is it?
The only way to wedge that kind of stuff in is to cut other stuff out, so where would you suggest we cut enough material to show the decline of Denethor, or the motivations of Sauruman, or the debate which led to the decisions PJ chose to show us? Take out the prologue to ROTK, which gives us a look at what the ring can really do to a person and what will probably happen to Frodo if he doesn’t succeed in destroying it? Okay, fine, that’s five minutes or so. Trim out Legolas taking out the oliphaunt and its crew? Okay, another 2 or three minutes. Troll fight in the first movie? Okay, another couple minutes, ditto for the collapsing stairs.
Sooo…we have 10-15 minutes of stuff that doesn’t necessarily add to the plot to cut out of nearly 10 hours of footage in the theatrical releases. How would you suggest we show all the stuff people bitch about effectively in that amount of time?
I assume what you are referring to is the female sex slavery theme of the Gor novels that differentiates them from other fantasy series. And yeah, I am surprised. Because why make a Gor movie if you aren’t going to deal with that? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just NOT make a Gor movie if you didn’t care for that theme? It would be like making a LOTR movie if you were utterly uninterested in the nonhuman races and characters – hobbits, elves, orcs, nazgul, that sort of thing. I suppose it would be possible but why bother?
So, yeah, I was surprised that they kept the sexual bondage out of the Gor movies.
(I didn’t even know a movie a movie had been made.
They made two, Gor and Outlaw of Gor. Outlaw of Gor was picked up by Mystery Science Theater 3000 and given a well-deserved working-over, as it was godawful in just about every respect.
By the way, I didn’t dislike Bakshi version of TLOTR (though Jackson’s version is way, way better)…Am I the only one?
I’m sure Bakshi’s mom liked it.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I think the Denethor gluttony scene was PJ’s way of showing visually what in the book was expressed verbally by Pippin to Gandalf, i.e., “I’m not used to waiting hungry on others who are eating. A sore trial for a hobbit, that.” (Or something pretty close to that, I’m not going to dig the book out this morning for an exact quote.)
Some of the things I hear people complaining about ARE straight from the books, sometimes in a different form but sometimes just bringing to life a huge fight scene that in the books isn’t described in detail, like the cave troll in FOTR. It would take a pretty nasty fight to tire Gandalf out enough that he would already be exhausted by the time he met the Balrog, and PJ chose to show that dramatically.
So while there were a few additions that were unnecessary, they were really surprisingly few and far between, considering he had ten hours of movie to make. And most of the things that were in there were in the books, were just his interpretation of the books, but just because his interpretation might differ from mine doesn’t make it any less valid.
And he paid attention to the tiniest details. Leaf-paddled blades on the boats in Lothlorien? Check. Glimpses of horses in the raging waters that take out the Nazgul at Rivendell? Check. The narrow, switchbacked trail with pukel-men leading to Dunharrow? Check. And on and on and on. Enough to keep this fangirl happily watching for all those details for years to come!
Frodo lives!
I haven’t read this whole thread yet, but I have to agree with Miller here.
Wizard of Oz? Gone With the Wind? Movies and books loved all over the world, but the books and movies were not very similar. Gone with the Wind was a bit better than Wizard of Oz following the story, but still, you cannot expect for a movie to mirror a book, ever.
An author has more liberties than does a screenwriter/director. A writer has the elements of time (you can spend YEARS writing a single book, getting every detail just the way you want it.). A director has said actors for specific amounts of time. Writers’ costs are small when writing…paper and pen. Directors budgets are huge, but finite, I’m sure. At some point the producers will have to rein in the expenses.
Mostly, a writer has the luxury of time. A person will pick up a book, read it…they can put it down when they don’t have time to finish it. They will come back later and pour hours of themselves into reading. You have the average moviegoer for 2-3 hours.
On top of which, it’s the scenes like the fight with the cave troll, the collapsing stairs, and Legolas killing the elephant that fills 90% of the seats in the theaters. The leaf-shaped paddles might bring in the Tolkienistas, but it’s the kick-ass fight scenes that have made the movies smash hits. Cut out too many of the action sequences, and you don’t get any LotR movies at all, because now they’re no longer profitable enterprises.
:smack: You know, I’d been trying to get a handle on that scene. Everyone keeps talking about Denethor being gluttonous, but he’s not: he eats a couple of tomatos and a chicken breast. But I was thrown by the way the camera kept focusing on him eating, and cranking up the audio of his snacking away. Obviously, it’s because we’re seeing it from Pippin’s POV! He’s a hobbit, and he has to stand there and watch someone else eat, without getting any for himself! That’s how dedicated he is to being a good Gondorian soldier! It’s so obvious now…
Well, that action scenes are indeed kick-ass, but that’s the trap Lucas fell into. What PJ realizes that many directors do not is that special effects only work if they serve the story. Ultimately, the success of a story depends on how well the story and the human elements are handled. In LOTR, yes, you have the battles of Helm’s Deep and Pellenor Fields, you have the mumakil and the uruk-hai, but what makes the movies so special is that PJ keeps the most essential bits of Tolkien’s story, the relationships between the characters. As magnificent as all the battles and the creatures are, it is lines like, “I can’t carry the ring, Mr. Frodo, but I can carry you,” that make LOTR so beloved. (and yes, I sniveled like a bitch in the theatre, so what!)
That’s why fanboys irritate the living crap out of me. They are fixated on petty details and specifications and blueprints, but they are oblivious to the love, honor, and courage of the characters that elevate LOTR to the level of myth.
gobear: Absolutely agree. My point is that the LotR movies are so succesful because PJ finds the balance between emotion and spectacle. The former is what makes the movies good, but the latter is what makes the movies profitable. It’s all very well to say “They should have cut out the bit with Legolas killing the elephant to give them more time to do Denethor being corrupted by the palantir,” but there are far, far more people who want to see Legolas’s improbable stunts than some minor character they don’t care about fiddling with a paperweight.
That’s pretty much how I feel about it as well. I’m the recognized LOTR “geek” at work and amongst all my friends, and I love both the books and the films. I think that they’re masterpieces of fantasy literature.
Frankly, if the best the critics of the films can do is nitpick this or that detail from the books, then it means that Jackson and Company did a damn fine job. They took a series of books which many (including myself, for a long time) had considered “unfilmable” – I for one thought that any film version of LOTR was doomed to failure 4 years ago – and made excellent adaptations of it. And more than that, they made them successful… they’ve proved that the fantasy genre of film can be financially viable, with sufficient dedication and passion for the work. And they’ve made some standout movies in the process.
This, my friends and brothers, is a Good Thing.
What’s important to me is that PJ captured the heart of the books perfectly. He may have changed some of the details of the story as Tolkien concieved it, but most of those changes were necessary to the medium. It’s easy for Tolkien, for example, to simply say that a battle was won. It was up to Peter Jackson to show that it was won, and how… the responsibilities of a film director and an author are very different, and how they get a point across changes from one medium to the other.
I am a fanboy of both the books and the films… and I say here that both tell the same story in slightly different ways. The themes of the book, and the emotions it stirred in me, were matched (perhaps even enhanced) by those experienced in the films. And for that reason I say that Peter Jackson did a better job than I think anyone expected, and deserves the praise he is receiving.
I’m not a fan of fights and stunts for their own sake. I’m not sure I ever said that stunts, fights, suspense or explosions make a good film what it is, but that they make film what it is, as opposed to, say, theater or dance or poetry. Audio and visual is intrinsic to the art form of cinema, and part of that is building spectacle for people to hear and see.
It’s not that I like stunts and fights and explosions more than clever dialogue or compelling story. I would have edited the fight at Helm’s Deep, for instance, to run a trifle shorter, mostly because the gray and black overwhelmed the color palette at the end of the film. It’s almost a shock to see green again when the Ents come back. However, films are ultimately about what we see and hear because that’s what film is — as I have been maintaining here.
Ask any director if it is easy to film six pages of pure dialogue in a film without bringing the pace to a crashing halt. Hint: it ain’t. Many people get restless. I would have happily sat through another 20 minutes of the Council of Elrond, but I know that in an adventure film, it’s simply not practical for the general audience, no matter what I think of it.
A version of Lord of the Rings that was faithful to the book — one that gave the action set-pieces as much weight as Tolkien gave them — would have Gandalf telling us about Saruman’s treachery and his defeat of the Balrog, and Merry and Pippin talking about the assault on Isengard, would have us listening to Legolas and Gilmi sit around and reporting the Paths of the Dead, and we’d get to hear Aragorn mention that he’s got a beautiful elf-maiden that we never, in fact, see, from one brief scene at a table beside Elrond all the way until the final moments of the film. Not to mention we’d get to listen to endless speeches by Gandalf and Elrond about the Olden Days of the Last Alliance, Gandalf droning on endlessly about how the Ring was forged, who Sauron is, what Sauron is probably doing now, who Isildur was and why we should care, and Saruman would have about six minutes of total screen time: and Sauron, none.
While I’m perfectly happy reading these things in the book, my point is that ultimately, film has to be boiled down to its essential visual and audio elements. In the case of a battle scene where the Deeping Wall is blown up by trickery of Saruman, that means stunts, fights, and explosions.
If you disagree that these are essentially filmic treatments, I would strongly argue the point; if you merely suggest that you found those elements artificial and boring, you’re mightily welcome to that opinion. Seriously.
FISH
Ehh, I think you’re stretching a bit, there. You may only see Denethor putting away the aforementioned items, but he has a couple of king-sized silver salvers piled high with goodies - and just after he has sent his son off to die along with the cream of Gondor’s cavalry is a poor time for him to be stuffing his face at all, let alone with all the feeding-trough noises he’s making.
The Pippin quote is relevant, but it hardly proves that the book Denethor was gourmandising off-scene. If Pippin was waiting on someone who was having anything to eat, and getting nothing himself, his reaction would be more or less the same, maybe. The only actual time we see food and drink in Denethor’s presence is when he has a cake and a cup of wine brought in to refresh himself and Pippin during their initial interview. You could argue that on that occasion he had either had breakfast recently, or was still sane enough to be ashamed to stuff himself in front of Gandalf, but either of those would be a stretch again.
PJ’s treatment of Denethor was much akin to a production of “the Scottish Play” in which Lady Macbeth makes her first entrance already screaming “Out, out, damned spot!”… as to what could have been trimmed, there is scope for a list there. As to Legolas’s uber-stunt with the mumak, it was well done - but I saw “The Empire Strikes Back” a little over twenty years ago.
Have I mentioned that there was any amount of good stuff in the film, with the rendering of Minas Tirith up at the top? I don’t want to appear hyper-critical, after all.
That’s not the best metaphor for the situation, though, because Lady MacBeth is the second most important figure in the play, while Denethor is an exceedingly minor character in Lord of the Rings. In a way, her going mad is what MacBeth is about. Return of the King is not about Denethor going mad. That he is mad is enough for the purposes of the reduced version of the plot used in the movies.
I myself have a foot in each camp. While I am a droolinfanboi of the books (read the series Hobbit inclusive over 100 times in my life), I must confes I think PJ did a great job so far (I haven’t seen RotK yet).
Thus far I have only one gripe on the changes, Faramir! Why did his basic character motivations need changed? He went from being a testament of the good and noble still in humantiy, to being a man who is out for himself. That was the ONE change they made that really pissed me off. I was even able to accept the Ents deciding not to help until they are tricked.
I’d say that’s a pretty poor reading of his character as portrayed in the films. He wasn’t “out for himself,” he was trying to earn the love of a father who had neglected him all his life. He was willing to be very unselfish (even riding to what he thought was certain death) to earn that love. He was also a noble captain and an honorable man in general.
The way these qualities were protrayed in the film was different than the book, to be sure. However, I would argue that the movie portrayed the same qualities in Faramir that the books did… just in a different way.
This argument would actually extend, for me, to pretty much all of the “changes” critics are complaining about.